What is important is not so much to locate the first вЂњmaskвЂќ used against disease, but rather to discuss how ideas, practices, and imaginations of face-covering devices emerged in different social and epistemic contexts. So there is a material continuity in place on the one hand, and an ontological, symbolic and epistemic discontinuity on the other, making it crucial to study their interplay and its material, aesthetic, social and behavioral impact on the ground. But all these cases were meant to protect doctors from a plague imagined as miasma, or вЂњbad air.вЂќ What we see, by contrast, in the course of the third pandemic, already by 1900, is the use of face-covering devices against bacteria. Similarly, following the Vetlianka plague epidemic in Russia in the late 1870s, doctors published designs of hazmat-like anti-plague uniforms involving complex respirators. We know from oil paintings that people burying plague corpses in Marseille in 1721 wore cloths around their mouth and nose.

(ЕЊsakashiritsu Momoyama ByЕЌin 1987: 222.)Д¬hristos: This is a difficult question, as it depends on what we mean by вЂњplague masks.вЂќ The image that comes to mind immediately is that of the вЂњBeaked Doctor.вЂќ These early modern physicians wore masks when examining plague patients, which were meant to protect them from miasma. Plague Outbreak, Momoyama Hospital, Osaka, Japan, c. 5 Christos, do you know of any other cases of early plague masks?ДЇigure 1. 4 In Japan, doctors and quarantine officers had already begun to wear masks during the plague epidemic in Osaka in 1899вЂ“1900, especially after two doctors and one quarantine officer died from the pneumonic plague in January 1900 (Figure 1). 3 ChristosвЂ™ research article in Medical Anthropology had been more carefully written. Wu Liande, a Cambridge-educated doctor and the inventor of the so-called вЂњWuвЂ™s maskвЂќ during the Manchurian plague, himself mentioned masks that preceded his, in places such as Germany and Japan. In his latest article, published by the New York Times in February 2020, he wrote: вЂњnti-epidemic masks as we know them today were invented in China more than a century ago, during the Chinese stateвЂ™s first effort to contain an epidemic by biomedical means.вЂќ 1 So, I wrote in Gendai ShisЕЌ, вЂњthe use of masks by medical personnel for the purpose of disease prevention began with the Manchurian plague in 1910вЂ“1912.вЂќ 2 After its publication, several Chinese scholars, including Meng, made me realize that I was mistaken. Tomo: When I first started writing on the history of masks for the Japanese journal Gendai ShisЕЌ, I read several articles by Christos. In a conversation between these three scholars, they discuss their research on the history of plague masks in East Asia. Christos LynterisвЂ™ work on plague masks has inspired Tomohisa Sumida and Meng Zhang to trace the history of masks in Japan and China, respectively.

As masks began attracting increased attention in 2020, historians of science and anthropologists began independently investigating the situated histories of this iconic artifact.

History of the plague doctor